Overseas, ByteDance recreates a "Little Red Book"

ByteDance has launched an app called Lemon8 in overseas markets, which is rapidly rising in Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States, becoming a new traffic gathering place for creators and users. In this article, we will explore how Lemon8 has achieved remarkable results in overseas markets by leveraging TikTok's traffic support and localized marketing strategies.

Jess Ling, 35, who lives in Malaysia, works as a blogger on Lemon8 in addition to her daily administrative work. In her opinion, Lemon8 has good traffic and is suitable for beginners.

Jess Ling is a Buddhist, and she is not very diligent in updating on Lemon8, sometimes only posting once a month (equivalent to a "note" on Xiaohongshu). Jess Ling, who has less than 1,000 followers, used to get more than 100 views for a single note. But from September 28 to October 4, she had not updated for more than a month, but the exposure of a single note on Lemon8 reached more than 1,700.

Jess Ling, who is also a blogger on some other similar content platforms, told 36Kr that it would be difficult to have such high exposure without keeping updating.

From Southeast Asia to Europe and the United States, Lemon8 is becoming a new blue ocean of traffic for creators.

Lemon8 is an app under ByteDance that mainly contains pictures, texts and short videos. It adopts a double-column information flow design, where platform users can share their lives. Because its main color is yellow and it has a very similar positioning and UI design to Xiaohongshu, Lemon8 is also called "Xiaohuangshu" by netizens.

According to Diandian data, Lemon8 has been ranked first in the lifestyle app rankings in the US iPhone market for the past month, and has been ranked within the top 30 in the overall rankings most of the time. Although it is not a big hit, its achievements cannot be ignored.

bunny, who is doing localized marketing in the US, said that because the creation cost is low and Xiaohongshu’s model has been proven in the domestic market, “after Lemon8 takes it to the US, it can achieve a dimensionality reduction strike”. He has already started planning.

01 Why does Lemon8 have so much traffic?

One of the important reasons why Lemon8 is popular is that it mainly has local users and its content is created by local people.

Malaysian Nini has a distinct Southeast Asian accent, but is familiar with some popular words on Xiaohongshu and Douyin, such as "Jimei", "薅羊毛", etc. At the same time, she also uses some popular words on the local network when playing Lemon8 and TikTok, such as "Gou Li", which she explained means "wow", and she uses such words to describe the content of the "pornographic book".

Nini is a loyal user of Lemon8. She thinks Lemon8 is very international, with English and Malay as the main languages. “People from Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia are playing here.” She often reads bloggers’ sharing of cheap and good things, as well as gossip, food, travel guides, etc.

Endia, an American blogger on Lemon8, has more than 10,000 followers. When she was exchanging her creative experience with another blogger, she said that content related to skin care and makeup is very popular on local platforms.

In addition, Jess Ling and Nini both praised Lemon8's creation templates for being exquisite, convenient, fashionable, and "very Instagram-like". In November last year, Lemon8 also launched an AI photo studio with features such as facial analysis, skin detection, body shape assessment, and idea notepad to attract new female users.

But if that were the case alone, it would not be enough to explain why it has been able to gain a foothold among a number of local and overseas community products.

When sharing her creative experience, Jess Ling said that TikTok played an important role in Lemon8's high traffic. She said, "Lemon8's notes can be posted directly to TikTok."

TikTok and Lemon do have a one-click sharing feature. TikTok also allows creators to add Lemon8's account link on their personal homepages for traffic. Similarly, Lemon8 has the same setting. In addition, TikTok's For You page has a lot of Lemon8 promotional information. The number of views of the topic "#Lemon8" on the platform has reached more than 4 billion, not to mention that many celebrities on TikTok have been invited to join Lemon8.

To some extent, TikTok is Lemon8's traffic cow.

In addition, Lemon8's downloads have increased significantly, which is closely related to its recent investment behavior.

According to App Growing, a mobile advertising intelligence analysis platform, the average daily number of Lemon 8 ads in October this year was more than three times that of the same period last year. In addition, many users who have used Lemon8 reported to 36Kr that they have seen Lemon8 ads on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook many times.

As TMT industry investor and Dragon Slayer anchor Zhuang Minghao observed on Jike about Lemon8, "We can probably guess that the project team may have obtained some U.S. market quotas from management in recent times."

According to Data.ai, Lemon8 has received more than 56.1 million downloads from overseas users. As of September this year, Thailand is the largest source of active users for Lemon8, accounting for 36.18%, followed by the United States, which accounts for 22.13%. Users in Southeast Asian countries have brought a lot of activity to the platform, while American users are the new user growth engine for the platform.

02 Learn from Xiaohongshu and surpass Xiaohongshu?

Why is Lemon8, which is so similar to Xiaohongshu, not created by Xiaohongshu?

In fact, Xiaohongshu has quite a few overseas products. In February 2021, April and November 2022, it launched Uniik for the Japanese market, Spark for the Southeast Asian market, and Catalog, a home sharing community for the European and American markets. Both the content and UI design are similar to Xiaohongshu.

Jae was responsible for the strategic planning and product design of Spark, Xiaohongshu's overseas product, from 2022 to 2023, and witnessed the birth and decline of this app. She told 36Kr that in March this year, Xiaohongshu's new overseas product S'more, which is similar to Dianping, was handed over to the outsourcing team.

When talking about Lemon8 now, Jae, who has been away from the company for almost two years, still feels angry. She and her former colleagues called Lemon8 a "copy cat", which literally means plagiarist.

Turning back the clock three years ago, Jae only felt a sense of crisis about Lemon8 at the beginning of his employment because "it was the first one." Later, Jae and his team spent more time trying to replicate Xiaohongshu's domestic model in its overseas products. Judging from the results now, Xiaohongshu's overseas apps and Lemon8 have never had a chance to compete head-on.

But Xiaohongshu’s overseas products have a potential role model to learn from: TikTok.

According to Jae's recollection, there were four product managers in her product team at the time, one of whom came from TikTok. In addition, many programmers also came from ByteDance. In its overseas expansion plan, Xiaohongshu wanted to make up for some of the things that ByteDance is good at, such as live streaming e-commerce.

Lemon8 is more of a supplement to TikTok than a replacement, as it is used to absorb users and traffic that TikTok cannot cover.

Compared to Lemon8’s aggressive stance of leveraging TikTok, madly investing in traffic, and unabashedly borrowing the Xiaohongshu model, Xiaohongshu’s overseas expansion is very low-key, so much so that when Spark was launched, netizens did not believe it was a Xiaohongshu product, and even thought it was pirated. In addition, Jae can also recall many reasons why Xiaohongshu’s overseas expansion was unfavorable, including an insufficiently in-depth localization team, wavering goals, and so on.

Everyone knows the subsequent story. Among Xiaohongshu’s overseas apps, Uniik has stopped updating in less than a year, Spark is facing serious creator retention issues and is gradually being forgotten by users. However, Lemon8 has successfully used Xiaohongshu’s “magic” to gain a foothold in Southeast Asia and even Europe and the United States.

However, there are still some "sparks" left in Xiaohongshu's overseas expansion - Xiaohongshu is used very frequently among overseas Chinese groups. According to current known data, in 2022, 1.5 million Chinese in Malaysia will use Xiaohongshu. Jae also shared a case of a blogger she knows, who was originally an international student. After working, he started working on Xiaohongshu and now takes orders full-time, with an annual income of up to one million yuan.

It is still uncertain whether Lemon8 can become the next TikTok. After all, it still faces competition from Instagram, which has more than one billion users worldwide.

Lemon8, which is on the crest of the traffic wave, needs time to prove that it is not just a flash in the pan.